[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#620589: Bug#620589: sbuild: option to turn off log filtering

[Jakub Wilk]

* Roger Leigh <rleigh at codelibre.net>, 2011-04-03, 01:26:
>>Please add an option to turn off log filtering. Thanks in advance.
>That's no problem.

Thanks.

>>(To be honest, I don't understand why you decided to cripple logs with 
>>this "feature"...)
>
>Some people complained that build logs couldn't be diffed easily due
>to the random part in the build directory name (which the filtering
>makes constant).

Yes, I stumbled on this problem a few times, too. But:

1. If you diff logs only ocasionally, you can easily fix the problem 
locally. Just use search&replace function in your $EDITOROFCHIOCE. Or 
write a <50 lines post-processing script in your $LANGUAGEOFCHOICE.

2. If you diff logs on large scale, you need the current sbuild's log 
filtering is too naïve: there are other sources of diff noise, which 
sbuild cannot always fix without losing information (e.g.  
aptitude/apt-get/dpkg output). So one would up with writing a 
(sophisticated) log post-processor anyway.

3. sbuild _do_ lose information even now, because strings like CHROOT 
and BUILDDIR can occur naturally in a build log. See e.g.:
https://buildd.debian.org/fetch.cgi?pkg=stunnel4&arch=ia64&ver=3:4.29-1&stamp=1260333411&file=log

4. If want copy&paste filtered log snippets and send them to other 
people, I need to either undo the filtering (which cannot be done fully 
automatically, see 3.) or write an extra explanation about the 
transformation that were done. This is completely unnecessary burden.

-- 
Jakub Wilk